Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 1)

Ryan has bootstrapped a FinTech small business lending business from Michigan, raised Private Equity funding to scale, and then bought the PE stake back through a Management Buy-out. Excellent case study!

Sramana Mitra: All right, Ryan, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

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Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So based on this, in terms of prioritization, are you going more after the enterprise accounts, the very large deals like the Infosys, TCS, and IBM global services, or are you going after the mid-market? Where are you finding traction?

Cloud Stocks: BlackLine Builds on its AI Offerings

Accounting software solution provider BlackLine (NASDAQ: BL) recently announced its first quarter results that outpaced market expectations. BlackLine continued to add innovative AI-based capabilities to its offerings.

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Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So coming back to what you just said on the how, let’s double click down one more level. Take me through examples of how you use generative AI to stitch together these disparate systems in the software development process.

The Startup Velocity Question: Lack of Understanding of Positioning as a Discipline

I was chatting with an experienced venture capitalist in Silicon Valley about his portfolio’s Positioning challenges. He said, “In a lot of cases, Positioning (and the messaging that follows) is indeed the problem. But a bigger problem behind this is that the founders do not see much value in investing in this area. The founders with technology background tend to value certain aspects of marketing such as lead gen, trade show, etc., but completely underestimate the value of proper positioning. It has been hard for me to get the founders to pay attention to it and spend their time and money on it.”

This problem, unfortunately, is pervasive in the industry.

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Great. Let’s kind of role play through this and tell what you pitch to your VCs from a TAM point of view. What is the positioning? What segment are you going after? What use cases are you going after? What is the pricing model? What is the business model or the pricing model? 

Catching Up On Readings: MLSec Market

This report from CB Insights looks at how the machine learning security (MLSec) market is growing as companies deploying generative AI-powered solutions invest in securing their AI applications against threats like sensitive data loss, data poisoning, and prompt injection. Startups in the space raised $213M last year, up from $70M a year ago. For the last two weeks’ posts, click on the paragraph links.

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, for six-seven years, you stayed in the same company, is that right?

Erik Severinghaus: No, I was at SpringCM. We built that. We got it growing again. We ended up selling that to DocuSign right before the pandemic.